10 Awesome Pure CSS Graph and Chart Techniques

Lets be honest, CSS would typically not be the first technology you would go to for building a visually effective interactive graph or chart, certainly not without at least a touch of Javascript. There are quite a few technologies you would think, Flash comes to mind first, followed by Javascript (thousands of jQuery plugins), you may even go for an SVG chart, or you may even like to use a graphic editor with interactive capabilities like Fireworks or Photoshop.

Having said all that, creating a pure CSS chart that is both visually beautiful and highly interactive, especially with CSS3, is very much possible, as this round-up proves.

Astonishingly the only images that have been used in this amazing chart example, are the icons that illustrate the related products. Everything else you see in this demo, is created using pure CSS3. I’ll bet you are thinking how it has all been achieved? You can view the tutorial by clicking the links below.Wicked CSS3 3d bar chart →View the Demo →

This pure CSS3 interactive chart did very well in Smashing Magazines recent CSS3 design contest, it came, not surprisingly, first. No tutorial with this one, but you can download the source files, allowing you to reverse engineer the entire process.CSS3 Charts →View the Demo →

In this in-depth tutorial, you’ll be constructing a flexible bar graph using good old traditional CSS and HTML. The key concepts that will be covered are: the background property, absolute positioning, CSS selectors, first-child, CSS sprites, containing block, cascade, and styling of unordered lists.Flexible Bar Graphs using CSS →

This tutorial offers a unique and creative variant on CSS Globes’ famous pure CSS data chart (you will find it below) by explaining how to create a chart with stacked columns.CSS Stacked Bar Graphs →View the Demo →

This chart tutorial tackles the not as generally used and very difficult to build line graph. Even if you are not a fan of line graphs and data visualization in general, you should still read this article and think of it as a CSS experiment and perhaps learn a thing or two about CSS sprites and positioning.Pure Css Line Graph →View the Demo →

This tutorial explains that a chart is a two dimensional object. Thus, the best structural and semantical choice is to use a definition list. Although the list is linear, you could interpret definition titles (dt elements) as items on x axis and definition descriptions (dd elements) as values on y axis.Pure Css Data Chart →View the Demo →